Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
A show about the law and the nine Supreme Court justices who interpret it for the rest of America. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.
Episodes
January 3, 2026 • 59 mins
In a special new year retrospective, Amicus host Dahlia Lithwick revisits an important episode from early 2025. Back at the beginning of February, Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International affairs at Princeton University, pointed to the speed and viciousness of the very opening legal gambits in Trump 2.0 as evidence that America had already switched over to the fast track for autocrac...
Mark as Played
December 27, 2025 • 69 mins
Over the past calendar year, the Supreme Court’s center has shifted to the right and then more to the right, and the justices’ decisions have time and again facilitated Trump’s agenda. But the Roberts majority is not simply focused on what the current president wants; it has its sights set on a larger project: voting. Suppressing and constraining and problematizing the core function of democratic rule. In this episode, Dahlia Lithw...
Mark as Played
December 20, 2025 • 63 mins
In mid-March of 2025, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt and his colleagues started hearing that the Trump administration might attempt a flagrantly lawless publicity stunt, involving migrant men, secret flights to El Salvador, a notorious gulag, and a total disregard for due process. Despite getting word that something was about to happen, and rushing into a Saturday night hearing, and then securing a TRO from DC judge James Boasberg, Lee ...
Mark as Played
December 13, 2025 • 67 mins
Trump decided this past week that there was no downside to fully embracing the racist “shithole countries” rhetoric he denied seven years ago; but this mask coming fully off is just the latest chapter in a decades-long campaign to gut a very specific part of the constitution: the reconstruction amendments. On this week’s Amicus episode, Dahlia Lithwick talks to civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill about the critical role the 14th ...
Mark as Played
December 6, 2025 • 67 mins
While the Secretary of Defense pursues lawless boat strikes with a laser focus on maximum trolling, the Supreme Court is working to undermine voting rights with a laser focus on maximum support for Republicans.
In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and co-host Mark Joseph Stern discuss the news that Trump’s extra-constitutional attempt to restrict birthright citizenship is heading back to the Supreme Court. They also ...
Mark as Played
November 29, 2025 • 54 mins
By design – and also by dint of unbridled, undisciplined extremist exuberance – Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House is thus far a tricky thing to characterize. While many of the administration’s moves seem copy/pasted from a manual for authoritarian takeover, they’re also deeply rooted in longstanding structural democratic deficits in America. For their part, The administration’s boosters argue this whiplash-inducing di...
Mark as Played
November 22, 2025 • 59 mins
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah, who brings her extensive experience trying and supervising federal criminal cases to a discussion of what the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse can teach us about justice. She suggests that the Trump administration’s eleventh-hour switchback tactic of calling for investigations of only Democrats speaks volumes about how the Justice Department is functionin...
Mark as Played
November 15, 2025 • 80 mins
Dahlia Lithwick welcomes retired federal judge Mark Wolf for his first ever podcast interview. The Reagan-appointed jurist made headlines last week with his searing indictment of the threat posed to the rule of law and democracy by the current administration. Judge Wolf opens up about his decision to leave the bench after decades of public service and the challenges faced by judges in the face of a president and a Justice Departmen...
Mark as Played
November 8, 2025 • 64 mins
The Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have been treating the Trump administration with such extreme deference that we were honestly a little flummoxed listening to this week’s arguments over his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Shockingly, during Wednesday’s arguments in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, it seemed like the justices were in fact, concerned with presidential overreach. But was this a true...
Mark as Played
November 1, 2025 • 67 mins
“The Chief Justice… is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America”. That quote did not come from host Dahlia Lithwick, but this week’s guest, former Federal Circuit Court Judge and George H. W. Bush appointee, J Michael Luttig. On this week’s show, Judge Luttig explains the unprecedented split we’re seeing between the federal courts and the highest court in the land in response to Trump’s lawlessness on everything from ta...
Mark as Played
October 25, 2025 • 55 mins
Bulldozers and bulwarks are the twin themes of this week’s show, as Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joyce White Vance, a longtime federal prosecutor and clarion voice in defense of the rule of law, despite its flaws. As Pam Bondi’s Justice department chases down the President’s opponents, Congress walks away from its constitutional duties, and the highest court in the land struggles to find a presidential demand too outrageous to rubb...
Mark as Played
October 18, 2025 • 54 mins
Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued in defense of the Voting Rights Act in the pivotal Supreme Court case, Louisiana v Callais this week. Nelson joins Dahlia Lithwick on this episode of Amicus to probe the implications of the case for voting rights around the country, and the role of the Supreme Court in a democratic system. Nelson warns that while the consequences of losing Section 2 would be catastroph...
Mark as Played
October 11, 2025 • 56 mins
Troops on America's streets, threats of “plenary powers”, and extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean have prompted members of the military past and present to say that we are in the biggest civil/military crisis since the Civil War. On this week's Amicus, how SCOTUS' immunity decision in Trump v. United States helped deliver us to this scary moment. Dahlia Lithwick speaks to Yale Law School military justice expert Eugene Fidell an...
Mark as Played
October 4, 2025 • 63 mins
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are joined by Vox’s Ian Millhiser to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court term, which officially starts on Monday. The term begins with a slew of wildly significant cases that feel all but decided in the Trump administration’s favor already. That feeling of inevitability could perhaps be ascribed to the ongoing assault on democracy coming from the high court’s shadow docket, which will no...
Mark as Played
September 27, 2025 • 83 mins
The week ended with a Grand Jury Indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for what looks to be a pair of unprovable crimes. Indeed the US Attorney overseeing the case declined to bring the indictment for that very reason. He’s gone and Donald Trump’s personal insurance lawyer brought the case. Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick discuss what that means for the Justice Department.
Then Yale Law School’s professor Justin Dri...
Mark as Played
September 20, 2025 • 52 mins
Dahlia Lithwick talks to First Amendment law professor Mary Anne Franks to explore the inversion of free speech in America this past week, and to trace the ways our assumptions about the First Amendment helped to tip us into this upside-down. Dr. Franks, author of Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment, explains the contradictions inherent in free-speech absolutism, the role of government in suppressing dissent, an...
Mark as Played
September 13, 2025 • 51 mins
In this week’s episode of Amicus, we delve into the recent Supreme Court shadow docket order in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo, which in essence legalized racial profiling by roving ICE patrols, and in practice may have ushered in America’s “show your papers” era for Americans with brown skin, who speak Spanish, and/or go to Home Depot in work clothes. Join Dahlia Lithwick and Ahilan Arulanantham, a longstanding human rights lawyer and l...
Mark as Played
September 6, 2025 • 55 mins
There is a “stuckness” to American political life right now, which has become a seemingly inexorable centrifuge of polarization, victimization and power grabbing. The constitution is brandished as sword and shield, and also as though it is the word of God. Americans, it seems, have lost the ability to think creatively and expansively about the constitution, and our ability to amend it. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is in c...
Mark as Played
August 30, 2025 • 57 mins
In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick discusses the recent deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C. and its implications for checks and balances in the U.S. legal system. She is joined by Elizabeth “Liza” Goitein from the non-partisan Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, a leading expert on all things Posse Comitatus, the Insurrection Act, and the Pandora’s box of domestic military deployment in p...
Mark as Played
August 23, 2025 • 49 mins
Women were prosecuted for experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth even before the Supreme Court swept away the protections of Roe v. Wade. But these prosecutions have ramped up since, in both red and blue states. The stakes are ramping up too, with legislators introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide, potentially subjecting patients to the death penalty. This week, Mark Joseph Stern talks with Karen Thompson, the lega...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.